Two concerns have received significant attention in critical writing about work and learning in late modernity: the subjugation of workers’ learning to the self-interest of capitalist corporations; and the cultural hegemony of the ‘ enterprise ethos’ . In an era when so-called knowledge capital is presumed key to corporate competitiveness, worker learning becomes an oft-contested site for developing this capital. Workers’ subjectivity, their ongoing formation of identity, is a particularly desirable area for corporate control. As Usher and Solomon (1999) point out, workers’ experience is treated as ‘ manageable and in need of management’ ‐ involving struggles over how the meaning and significance of experience is interpreted, and by whom. Forrester (1999) argues that work-related learning is enmeshed in workers’ struggles for subjectivity, as they resist or consent to corporate attempts to capture their commitments, aspirations, emotional engagements and formation of selves. Meanwhile in late economic modernity, as du Gay (1996) has shown, workers are expected to be active, selfresponsible, self-reflective constructors of their own work capacities, biographies and success. In this project of ‘ the enterprising self’ , individuals are expected to construct and self-regulate their own human capital in all spheres of life, subordinating their desires for development, meaning, fulfilment, relationships, even spirituality to their work activity and work capacity. Thus empowered, individuals are supposed to innovate and adapt continuously, take risks, and assume autonomous responsibility for the self and livelihood they design through their own choices. Garrick and Usher (2000) show how worker subjectivities are being shaped by current post-Fordist workplace structures and practices to become these ‘ active learners and self-regulating subjects’ , through a governmentality that ‘ works through infiltrating regulation into the very interior of the experience of subjects’ . While important, these arguments focus on the worker as employee. This article presents a different context in which to examine workers’ learning and struggles for subjectivity in the ethos of enterprise. There has been a surge, in Canada at least, of workers leaving organisational employment to start their own businesses. In particular, women’ s business start-ups have doubled the rate of men’ s in the past decade, and often outlast men’ s businesses (Business Development Bank, 1999; Industry Canada,
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Jun 1, 2002
Ulrich Bröckling 
